• Crossing the platform divide: Trolltech released Qt 4.4, a cross-platform software dev framework. It's dual-licensed for open-source and commercial dev. Widely used on Linux (underlying widget toolkit for KDE), and in commercial apps like Skype, Google Earth, and Adobe Photoshop Elements. Features include a multimedia abstraction layer, HTML rendering widget based on WebKit, a new concurrency framework, and support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile. An early glimpse was tested last year, and now it's been finalized with extensive testing.
• Bridging the gap between desktop and mobile development: Qt is supported on major desktop OSs. Trolltech offers Qtopia for Linux-based mobile OS. Qt 4.4 extends portability to Windows CE, enabling single app code bases. It's suitable for creating rich touchscreen UIs on Windows CE with good performance and native look support. Trolltech's tools integrate with Visual Studio. A demo shows Qt apps running on Windows Mobile and Linux. Qt support for Windows CE expands the open source software ecosystem by porting KDE and Qt apps. Nokia is acquiring Trolltech and plans to use Qt for cross-platform dev.
• Bringing together web content and native code: Qt 4.4's new QtWebKit module allows seamless mixing of HTML and native widgets. WebKit is an open-source HTML renderer adopted by many. The QWebView widget is a WebKit-based HTML rendering engine with a high-level Qt API. It can load local/remote URIs and strings. QtWebKit enables bi-directional integration and embedding of native widgets in web content. Hansen demonstrated its use with native code. QtWebKit has implications for RIA development. It also provides components for other browser functionality. Trolltech plans to implement a Qt widget for standard browser plugin API and a simpler web content manipulation API.
• Widgets on the QGraphicsView: QGraphicsView gets big improvements in Qt 4.4, including full support for native Qt widgets. Interactive widgets can be added to the canvas and manipulated. Input redirection is supported. This creates potential for richer UIs. Trolltech's Andreas Hanssen explained how to embed widgets. Minor technical problems from last year's tests seem fixed, and performance issues are being addressed.
• Singing with Phonon: Phonon is a cross-platform multimedia abstraction layer with lightweight API. Developed by KDE community for KDE 4 with Xine backend. Trolltech adopted it for Qt and added backends for GStreamer, DirectShow 9 on Windows, and QuickTime 7 on Mac OS X. Backends make Phonon work seamlessly on Windows and Mac with native media frameworks. The same code can be used for basic multimedia operations across OSs.
• Odds and ends: Qt 4.4 has many improvements not discussed here, including a new concurrency framework and XML framework. It's already adopted by KDE and Last.fm is experimenting with it.
• Talking to Trolltech: Trolltech CTO Benoit Schillings discussed the release. Qt 4.4 advanced key design goals. He believes it makes it easier for Windows Mobile devs to transition to Linux. There's interest in cross-platform mobile dev, and Trolltech offers a solution. He's interested in parallelism, multicore support, OpenGL, and more WebKit integration. Qt 4.4 brings new capabilities, and Trolltech has plans for Qt 4.5 after Nokia's acquisition. Developers can download Qt 4.4 from Trolltech's website.